everydayExcel Times

Use Microsoft® Excel Differently to Gain a Productive Edge

Issue - Nov 2008

Comparing numbers and percentage on the same excel chart

Your company have experienced tremendous sales growth for the last
5 years and you would like to present it on the chart. In addition to
showing the sales numbers, you would like to present the growth rate
on the same chart. When you have plotted out the chart, you realise that
the growth rate is relatively flat as it is suppressed by the sales
numbers which run into millions. A chart like this (below) would not
be meaningful at all.

If that is what you are facing, you might be interested to know that
Excel is capable of creating a 2 y-axes chart that will be able to present
the sales and the growth rate meaningfully on the same chart like the one
below, with the left y-axis showing the sales amount and the right axis
showing the growth.

Creating such an Excel chart is fairly simple. It is the same 4-step
process for creating a chart. The only change in the process is in excel chart
selection step. The step by step process is available in this
2 y-axis excel chart page.

Note that this chart is static, which means that it does not change until you
change the numbers in the table. If you are looking for a chart that will
automatically update with the latest figure, you can consider pivot chart.
To learn how to make use of Pivot Chart, attend our coming
Excel course
"Sales Performance Analytics with Excel" and we'll show you how to do
this and many other good stuff you can do in Excel.

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